Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

better one.’
    The camcopter spun around, soared, darted about wildly and
dived into the ground. The horses’ hooves, the worn tyres
of the vehicles, crushed it in seconds. Myra wasn’t
worried; she could see her own image, with a few seconds’
delay, appearing in the corner of her eyeband where CNN still
chattered away. The rest of the field was filled with bizarre
hallucinations, the net’s near-death experience.
    God filled the horizon, bigger than the sunrise.

 
15
The Hammer’s Harvest
     
     
    I sat on the plinth of the statue of the Deliverer, and smoked
a cigarette to fight my stomach’s heaves. Gradually my mind
and my body returned to some kind of equilibrium. The din of the
launch celebrations, the lights of the houses and pubs, became
again something I could regard without disgust and hear without
dismay. I stood up, and the ground was steady under my feet. I
looked up, and the sky was dark and starry above my head.
    I walked a few steps from the statue and turned around. The
Deliverer on her horse reared above me. Menial had told me, a
couple of weeks earlier, the reason why the Deliverer’s
features varied on all the statues I’d ever seen. She was a
myth, a multiplicity. Her hordes had never ridden from far
Kazakhstan to Lisbon’s ancient shore, as the songs and
stories say. They had never swept all before them. Instead, each
town and city had been invaded by a horde raised closer to home,
on its very own hinterland. How many hundred, how many thousand
towns had met the new order in the form of a wildwoman on a
horse, riding in at the head of a ragtag army to proclaim that
the net was thrown off, the sky was fallen, and the world was
free?
    It was that final message, the last ever spoken from the net
and the screens, that had identified them with that singular
woman, the Deliverer. I leaned forward, to read again the words
chiselled on this plinth, as it is on them all, from far
Kazakhstan to Lisbon’s ancient shore:
     
    NOTHING IS WRITTEN. THE FUTURE IS OURS TO SHAPE. WHEN YOU TAKE
THE CITIES, SPARE THE SCIENTISTS AND ENGINEERS. WHATEVER THEY MAY
HAVE DONE IN THE PAST YOU NEED THEM FOR THE FUTURE. LET’S
MAKE IT A BETTER ONE.
     
    The last words of the old world, and the first of the new.
    I thought of Menial, and took another step back, still drawing
on my cigarette. She was older than I had ever imagined possible.
But she was also, I realised, still as young as she’d
seemed when I’d first seen her. Nothing had changed,
nothing could change that lovely, eager, open personality. She
was not old, she had merely… stayed young.
    As I would.
    What did I have to complain about?
    I laughed at myself, at my own youthful folly. In the long
view of history, in the promise of a long life to come, the
difference in our chronological age, however great, could only be
insignificant.
    A step, a swish, a scent. Her warm, dry hand clasped mine.
    ‘Are you all right, Clovis?’
    I turned and looked at her, and drew her towards the plinth.
We sat down.
    ‘Menial,’ I said, ‘I know who you
are.’
    ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘And who am I?’
    I handed her the booklet, open at the page.
    She sat for a long moment looking down at it, with a slight
smile and a slowly welling tear.
    ‘Ah, fuck,’ she said. ‘Everybody else there
is long gone, as far as I know. But maybe I wouldn’t know,
as they wouldn’t know about me.’ She sniffed, and
handed the booklet back. ‘So now you know. I never wanted
to be what people would expect of me, if they knew.’
    ‘But you are,’ I said. You knew about the AI, and
you expected Fergal to do what he did. I saw your face when he
said it, and it was like you’d just cracked a piece of
white logic’
    ‘Or black! Aye, I knew. The Deliverer told me about it
herself, just before the end. She warned me that it was a
dangerous thing, though benign according to its lights. Like
Fergal!’
    ‘But why did you give it to him?’
    Menial leaned back and looked up. ‘Because the deadly
debris is up there, colha Gree. I know what happened at
the Deliverance, because I lived through it. I saw the flashes. I
was there when the sky fell. I knew the ship would never get
through without a much better guidance system than the one I was
working on – well, I knew by the time I’d finished
testing it, which was not that long ago. I needed someone to find
the AI under cover of seeking something else, and I needed